


My Way Home Is Through You

by dearcantaloupe



Category: The Umbrella Academy (Comics)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 04:17:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,706
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17317943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dearcantaloupe/pseuds/dearcantaloupe
Summary: Diego hated Vanya for leaving, then he hated her for coming back. Now he just hates himself. A reconciliation that takes place between Apocalypse Suite and Dallas. The first step in mending the broken pieces of who they are.





	My Way Home Is Through You

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [通向回家的路是你](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18143429) by [ammacrellin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ammacrellin/pseuds/ammacrellin)



> I had this idea floating around in my head for literal years, and now with the recent resurgence of all things Umbrella Academy (I still can't believe it, I'm living my best life), I finally decided to write it. I was always sad that these two never got a moment to heal together before everything took off again. This happens days after the events of Apocalypse Suite and before the events of Dallas. The title, of course, is taken from My Chemical Romance's song of the same name.
> 
> Not meant to be shippy, but take it as you will, I guess. Some very slight/vague self-harm mentioned in the form of fighting and poking/prodding existing injuries.

Diego stood in the dark of the room, listening to the machinery breathe life into a place that still felt dead, warming the cold, clinical air that circled through the whole of the underground base. It still felt more like a prison than it did a home, even as the mansion lay in ruins above them. The memories festered like ghosts through the wreckage, and in the low quiet drone of Vanya’s life support systems, he could hear the echo of words left unsaid—the ones he buried beneath bloody knuckles and thirteen years of resentment. 

As she slept, one broken eye stayed open just a slit, but she’d never know he was there. Part of him wanted to stay until she woke, but it was easier to leave, a sentiment he assumed she was familiar with once, before Number Five blew her brains out and left her memories on the theater floor. Unfortunately, Diego remembered, and her words repeated on a loop no matter how hard he tried to drown them out.

 _Because I love you_ , she had told him, voice twisted and musical, a symphony he wasn’t familiar with, and it cut into him raw. He could still feel it days later, scratching under his skin like the needle on a record player, leaving grooves on him to keep it spinning endlessly.

Her head fell to the side, murmuring through gentle sleep and without hesitation, Diego ducked out from the shadows and left the room before her eyes blinked awake.

Mother stood outside the bedroom, a tray of fruit resting in her artificial limbs. She stared as Diego left, though he refused to meet her gaze.

“You should speak to her. It might help,” she said when he was already halfway down the hall.

“What good would it do,” he asked, fingers curling at his sides. “She can’t remember any of us, and even if she could—she made her choice.”

“She didn’t get there on her own.”

He stopped dead, head turned over his shoulder at the plastic woman and her fake concern. All at once, the resentment was back, bubbling over the edge before he could contain it, hot as boiling tar as it coated his words. 

“Then she never should’ve come back.”

He was gone before he heard a response, if there was one. Whatever the woman had to say, it wouldn’t change a thing, and the record kept spinning inside of him.

Back in the city, he traded the concerns of family business with the mindless brutality of a fistfight, charging into a drug ring that had been on Lupo’s radar for weeks. He wouldn’t be happy to hear that Diego found it first, but information flows a lot more honestly after you break a few bones, and he broke plenty. He had the whole operation pinpointed before midnight, and by 12:01 stood in the middle of a warehouse that stank of chemical burn and roadkill, a pile of whimpering bodies at his feet with his knuckles split, ringing welcome pain all through the whole of him. The rest of the world deafened to the drumming of his heartbeat, the rushing of blood in his ears. He slipped out the back as the cops showed and just as the vibrating in his bones began to wear away, Vanya’s song came back full volume, her words filling up the space between breaths, circling all around him.

The night wasn’t over yet.

He stopped a mugging downtown where scumbags took advantage of the desolation, a drunk outside a bar looking for a fight, a wife-beater, a gang trying to steal a car, and an arms deal near the bay. By the time dawn lit the sky he could hardly walk, but it was better that way, with the dull, constant ache to keep off the edge of his own thoughts—to drown her away. And the city was all the better for it, that’s what he told himself at least, as he limped through alleys, making his way slowly back to the apartment, leaving a scattered trail of blood in his wake.

Pulling himself through the window instead of the door, Diego stumbled onto the floor and lay there for a while, making a mental note of all the aches and pains across his body. Blood pooled through his suit, maybe a broken rib—or two, or three—his fists bloody and split to the knuckle, and a bullet had grazed his thigh. But with the pain came silence, and in that silence he finally slept.

The music came back in waves. Quiet at first before building to crescendo, shaking the ground beneath him and Diego woke once more to the echo of a conversation that ended a lifetime ago. 

_Because I love you._

He shot up, despite the bruises on his side telling him to keep still. Heart pounding against his chest, he dragged himself to the record player, filing through the dust sleeves for anything loud enough to shut it all up. The dry blood caked onto his knuckles cracked away as he found one and put it on, though his eye caught sight of another at the back of the pile. A long forgotten 7-inch covered in a layer of dust, with a tattered jacket and a faded image of the Prime-8’s that hardly even seemed like a memory anymore. He held it up, traced the title with a finger, remembering how excited Vanya was to record an EP, how infectious her enthusiasm was. The only time he ever saw her smile, genuine and real, and maybe the last time he ever got to savor it before she left.

He clutched it tight, fondly at first, but as the past caught up with him—mistakes, and last chances—something changed and suddenly he wanted it to shatter. Instead, he placed it back among the others and tried not to look at it again, but no matter how hard he wanted to, he couldn’t stop thinking about what might have been.

In the daylight it was easier to see the city for what it was; a dying cesspool. That much wasn’t new, but since the incident downtown—since Vanya—the devastation was suffocating. Diego washed the blood off and dressed the wounds that needed dressing, and then left to find Lupo. He wasn’t at the office but it was easy enough tracking him down to his usual lunch spot. Not smart for a man of the law to be a creature of habit, and as Diego appeared beside him on his way out of the sandwich shop, the annoyance on his face was clear as the surprise.

“Jesus, you look like you’ve been steamrolled,” he said, unlit cigarette bobbing between his lips. One hand rest on the butt of his revolver, and one kept a tight hold on the italian sub. “How’d you know I wanted to meet?”

“I didn’t.” 

Diego followed him to the car, sliding into the passenger’s seat. He kept his head forward, but could feel Lupo’s stare, inspecting him from behind the ridge of his glasses as he lit a cigarette.

“That business downtown,” he started, as smoke filtered out from his mouth. “Sounds like something that you and yours might’ve had a hand in. Know anything about it?”

“World’s still spinning, Lupo. Count it as a victory.”

“Some kind of victory…”

There was a silence between them. Diego waved away a coil of smoke twirling beside his face, but the gesture didn’t seem to bother Lupo.

Finally, he asked, “What the hell are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to your partner,” Diego said.

The sandwich shop door swung open once more and a small, slump-shouldered chimpanzee in a long jacket stalked out, chewing on a sloppy sub. He stopped at the passenger’s door and peered in, his glare barely above the line of the window, unamused at Diego’s presence. 

They spoke outside, behind the sandwich shop and far from Lupo’s ears. The conversation didn’t concern him.

“Is this gonna take long? I have better things to do, like cleaning up what I can only assume is your family’s mess,” Body said, pointing a harsh, simian finger.

Diego ignored it. “You remember the Prime-8’s?” 

The name caught him off guard and he stared blank for a moment.

“We made a record—”

“I remember.” He paused. “Didn’t figure you to be nostalgic.”

“If you grew up in my family, you wouldn’t be, either.”

“Except when it comes to her, I guess.” It wasn’t a question and that bothered him more than it should have. Body used the silence as an invitation to continue. “I’m not doing a reunion. God knows you wouldn’t show.”

Diego kept his gaze down, and pressed against the bruise blooming over his knuckles. Sharp pain shot all the way through his fingers. “You were with my sister the night she left.”

“Yeah, for the gig, you blew it off and I was a month behind on my rent. Is there a point to this trip down memory lane?”

“Did she tell you why?” he asked without letting up on his knuckles. Body watched his grip tighten and narrowed his eyes.

“Why don’t you ask her?”

“Complicated,” Diego said through gritted teeth.

Out front, Lupo laid down on the horn of his car, trying to hurry them along. Body stepped back a few paces but didn’t yet turn around. “I left before she did, but she was still waiting for you to show up. Told everybody you would. Maybe she left because she realized she was wrong, hell if I know.” The horn sounded again and he took off, but stopped before disappearing around the corner. “Talk to your sister, Diego. Try being normal for once.”

Easier said than done, for more than one reason, and that’s not counting the bullet lodged in her brain.

On his way home, he switched routes and found himself outside a bookstore. _Extra Ordinary: My Life as Number 7_ sat on a display shelf in the front window. He hadn’t read it, and never planned to—he already knew the ending, but something about it now drew him in. Maybe it was the last piece of her remaining, a roadmap to show him the way back to where they’d been.

There was a picture of Vanya on the cover as a child with her violin and even beneath the slight, pensive smile at the corner of her mouth he could see the sadness brewing within her, different than the rage that had festered in himself at that age, an isolation so palpable he could feel it twisting through his gut just by looking, by remembering. 

Vanya was alone, left behind by them all. Always.

He went home without the book, returning to something better, something before it all went wrong. The Prime-8’s EP was waiting for him in the same place he had left it. He put it on to make sure it still played. The sound was full, and loud, and powerful, cutting through him the way it had when they first performed it. His bass, an undercurrent of violence while Vanya’s guitar shrieked beneath her muddied vocals. They were never trying to be perfect, they only wanted to scream. To piss Hargreeves off. To be together. 

The doctors had said she’d regain her memories slowly, but gentle reminders would help. Diego wasn’t so good at gentle, but he was willing to try. He gathered up the record, and a couple more he knew she liked, and when night came he snuck back into the base beneath the ruins of the mansion.

Space was asleep in his chair like it was a throne, the TV flashing in front of his face, making long shadows dance across the walls. Nobody else was around, sequestered to their own rooms like they were teenagers again, or some place far away. Diego didn’t much care one way or the other. He took the record player from the main room and brought it into Vanya’s.

The lights of the machines made a blue glow in the darkness and that familiar warmth circled around him as he set the records beside her bed. She could have mom play them in the morning, and maybe she’d begin to remember the times that weren’t so bad. Before he left her, and before she left him.

He was nearly out the door when her whisper reached him.

“Is someone there?”

Diego froze. He could’ve disappeared before she had time to question it further, but he forced himself to turn around instead, meeting her crystal gaze through the dark. She looked so different now, but behind the wreck of her blue eyes, he saw the same loneliness dancing beneath the surface that he’d seen in her photo. He clicked the lights on and took a few steps closer.

Vanya studied him a moment before her face lit up. “You’re one of my brothers. Our mother told me about you…” Her words trailed off, searching for a name. “Diego.”

“That woman’s hardly our mother,” he said, but Vanya didn’t look perturbed.

“She told me you’d say something like that.”

He was quiet, and then something happened that hadn’t for a long time. He smiled. Vanya did too, until she saw his knuckles, and the split, broken mess that had become of them. He didn’t try to hide it, no use to do so now.

“You hurt yourself?”

“No,” he said. “I hurt other people.”

Something shifted on her face and she frowned. “I think I do, too.”

Neither of them said a word as the past built a wall between them, brick by familiar brick, then Diego took another step closer, shattering it to pieces, and held the Prime-8’s record up so she could see. 

“I brought you some music. Stuff you like.”

Her eyes worked over the cover, taking it in with curiosity, and something that might’ve been recognition drew life back into her. He put it on the record player and as the crashing noise filled the empty room, and the empty years along with it, Vanya brightened. She couldn’t move much of her body, but her head bobbed along to the sound and she closed her eyes, savoring every note and then, halfway into it her lips moved, mouthing the words as they came.

She stopped abruptly, surprised at herself and the ease in which she remembered. “I know this song.”

“That’s because it’s you,” Diego said. He pulled the stylus up and let silence take over. Quietly, he added, “Us.”

A smile spread across her face and she was seventeen again. “Are we famous? Did we tour the world?”

There was jest in her voice, but guilt pooled inside of him all the same.

“It didn’t work out that way,” he said, leaving the details for another day.

Vanya didn’t really seem to mind, and as he put the music back on her excitement continued through the rest of the songs. Occasionally she recalled little moments—sneaking out the window to practice, a brawl during a show. He could imagine her fingers moving along to the guitar chords and for a while Diego felt like nothing had changed. He hadn’t ruined it, and she hadn’t left. The road back seemed clearer.

When the record was played on both sides, Diego shuffled through the others, showing her each one, telling her his favorites, and hers, from what he could remember. For a while he forgot everything else between them, and realized how badly he missed her. How badly he needed her.

“Thanks for this, by the way,” she told him after. “Nobody else wants to look at me, let alone speak to me. Somehow that feels familiar, but it’s different with you.” She paused, slowly meeting his eyeline. Her voice got low, a little tender. “Why is it different with you?”

_Because I love you._

“We were always the outcasts.” He turned his gaze to the floor. “We still are.”

She forced out a small laugh that was jagged around the edges. “At least I’m not alone.”

“No, you’re not,” he said. And this time he hoped to keep it that way.


End file.
